Google And Univision Focusing On Spanish Search Marketing

As more and more Hispanic users gravitate to the Internet and all that it offers, their exposure to search engines and the marketing associated with them increases as well. However, is there sufficient Spanish language support to provide these users with a seamless Internet shopping experience? Probably not…

So to remedy this, Google and Univision are talking about a partnership that would improve the prospect of search engine marketing using Spanish language. According to Nacho Hernandez, who posted this story at Search Engine Roundtable, Univision has one of the largest portals catering to the Spanish-speaking population in the United States.

A partnership like this will only improve the current state of Spanish-speaking supported search advertising, which currently hovers around non-existent. Nacho provides sound reasoning why an agreement like this would be successful:

I believe the objective of encouraging advertisers to translate their websites into Spanish mainly relies on the fact that U.S. Hispanics sometimes think in Spanish, therefore they will search in Spanish. Other times they think in English so they will search in English. They are not a “one size fits all” user, nor the statistics of how many are Spanish preferred versus English preferred reveal how dynamic the user is when searching. In my opinion, they are bi-lingual and bi-cultural. It’s important to target U.S. Hispanics in both languages…

As we’ve discussed in other articles, making changes to your site and marketing in way that supports the Spanish-speaking search base, especially if you have products that can appeal to this group, will only be beneficial, unless you don’t think a Spanish-speaking customers are worth the effort like some people I’ve come across when this topic is brought up.

Asinine comments aside, if Google thinks there is a place for marketing toward the Hispanic population within their lucrative advertising stable, then the whole “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” line of thinking seems quite appropriate. To learn a great deal more about how you should approach this type of advertising, please read Nacho’s excellent white paper (pdf) on the subject.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.